


A World Well Lost

by echelons



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 14:32:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18317192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echelons/pseuds/echelons
Summary: After six months away, Laura returns to the world she left.





	A World Well Lost

**Author's Note:**

> The AU is inspired by The Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire.
> 
> Title is modeled off the alternate title of Dryden's "All For Love, or, The World Well Lost."

Laura comes back through on a balmy summer night, the air perfumed with flowers and carrying the promise of rain. She’s spent the last six months in another world, a world of perpetual winter, where even the blazing fires and the thick walls of the Fortress couldn’t dispel the chill that settled in her bones. For the first time, standing in the backyard of the house where she grew up, the summer air barely troubled by a soft breeze, she feels warm again.

It feels wrong.

Laura climbs the well-worn steps of the back porch and enters through the back door, which Aunt Debbie never keeps locked. She moves with the silence she learned in the frozen forests, where even the crunching of snow could betray her position to the enemy. Slipping easily by her aunt’s room, then her cousin’s, she doesn’t stop until she reaches the room at the end of the hall.

The door creaks as Laura pushes it open, and the figure tucked safely away in the bed in the corner stirs sleepily. “Hi,” Laura says, softly, and then the figure is leaping out of bed and tackling Laura to the floor in an enthusiastic hug.

“Ow,” Laura says, lying on her back, the breath knocked out of her. “That _hurt,_ Gabby.”

“I’m not sorry,” her sister says from on top of her, poking her in the chest. “You left me.”

Laura’s hand goes up to caress Gabby gently on the cheek. It’s the same hand that snapped the neck of the traitorous Alchemist, the same hand that turned a knife into the stomach of the Invading General. “Yeah,” she says. “And I am so sorry.”

Gabby moves away, after a minute, and then Laura can sit up. The moonlight is streaming over their faces, onto the floor, and the window is cracked just enough to let the sounds of the night in. It’s warm, safe, and so alien to Laura that she wants to howl in despair.

“Where were you?” Gabby asks, and for all that she’s trying to sound calm, her voice shakes, and Laura knows that it has been a long six months for both of them.

“You wanna know the truth?” Laura smiles, and there’s something vicious, almost monstrous about the way she shows her teeth. “I walked through a door into another world.”

“Yeah?” Gabby asks, voice thick with disbelief. “What was it like?”

It was beautiful, Laura wants to say. It was brutal and dangerous and locked in perpetual winter, and it was beautiful. The Fortress was a great stone construction with thick walls and thin arrowslits, surrounded by a dark, foreboding forest where the branches grew so thick they blotted out the sky, where the wolves prowled, savage and hungry. Outside the walls, the Invaders slaughtered anyone who opposed them, and inside the walls, people starved, and the days that weren’t battles were still battles for survival, and it was beautiful, and it was home. She wants to say, it was _my_ world, the one that chose me, that reached across time and space and opened a door for me to enter, and I left it for you, Gabby, because I couldn’t stand the thought of you alone.

“It was cold,” Laura says, and then she scoops up her little sister and carries her back to bed.

Gabby grabs her wrist as Laura tries to leave, her grip surprisingly strong for such a young girl. “Don’t leave me,” she whispers, and Laura’s heart breaks and all she can do is climb obligingly into bed next to her sister, cradling her in her arms, warm and safe.

“You smell like Christmas,” Gabby mumbles, as her eyes close and she falls back towards sleep. It’s the scent of evergreen and woodsmoke, Laura knows, the scent of the daily life in the Fortress, a smell that will fade over time, never to be restored. She listens as Gabby’s breathing evens out, watches her eyes close and then flutter with sleep.

Laura remembers the way she had scratched at the Fortress’s heavy stone walls until her nails ripped and her fingers bled, begging the universe to open a door back, all so she could be here, in this moment. I gave up the world – my world – for you, she thinks, and it was worth it. In the morning, her aunt will find her, and there will be questions and tears and interviews with the police, but for now, Laura knows she is exactly where she is supposed to be.


End file.
